In the 2000s my dad brought home a "cheat card" and it was crazy. Everything that used to want money to watch we had free at any time along with every channel. Anything I wanted to watch, it was there. My dad said he was able to buy the "cheat" card in a store where they had a massive bin filled with them for sale at a cost of $50 for 1.

My grandmother was obsessed with me learning how to hack her TV receiver to get free TV! of course i was too young at the time and didn't even know such a thing was possible. Interesting video.

Used to work for NDS back in the early 2000s. Vividly remember waking up slightly hungover one day, and hearing on the BBC news that we were being sued for $2 billion for hacking Canal+. Press descended on our office, and we all had to do the 'no comment' stuff. A few years later, I randomly bumped into James Murdoch outside the offices of the Discovery Channel in London, where I was then working. Not sure why he was there, but we'd both gone out for a quick smoke. I asked him what the hacking stuff was all about, and he just smiled. Several years later, I was working at Sky, when all the 'phone hacking scandal happened here on the UK. Good memories.

I'm an American, but the satellite hacking scene was largely similar for us. Oh how fondly I remember those days and the cat-and-mouse games between us hackers and the service!! Started out as just sharing keys, then hacking cards, then on to emulation (scrounging old PCs from swap meets to plop behind someone's TV). They kept upping their encryption, we kept circumventing it, until one day we couldn't any longer. Made a little money, made a few good forum friends, had a lot of fun!

Did this in the US all thru the early 2000s. Taught myself just from the internet. Glorious days of the H card! Got all my friends and family on free satellite. Eventually moved everyone to the PC emulator. Became a pain for me having to keep everyone running, so much so I was kinda glad when it ended..

I remember we used to watch Europe paid satellite TV channels in the early 2000s here in Morocco using piracy cards, they were very popular here and sold everywhere

I used to have a program called "Voyager" running on an old 386 laptop and it sat there for years cracking Sky TV. Just needed a RS232 to TTL level converter from radio shack and you were sorted.

I remember when I was 13-14, and I bought a card reader/writer and used free software (3 musketeers, if I'm not mistaken) to unlock the card to "test" status, and I got all the DirecTV channels, including all PPV, Adult, and East coast channels for free. Those were the good old days....

We had one of these back in the late 90's at my parents' house. It actually had a special PCB attached to it for easy reprogramming.

I had a friend in the late 90s/early 00s that sold these cheat cards. He made a pretty good profit off it, being one of the few internet/computer savvy guys in a small town. Pretty much every person in town paid him for free satellite.

Ah, the good ol' days! I didn't know anything about what was going on down in Australia, but I was into the DirecTV hacking scene in the US. I remember programming H cards, then HU came along and unloopers (tools that glitched the power at precisely-timed points in the card's boot sequence) bypassed their security. Eventually we had full emulation (assisted by a dummy card with custom firmware to talk to the on-board super-secret NDS ASIC) that let us run multiple receivers from a single card. Finally we had to use receivers with hacked firmware loaded via JTAG that bypassed the ZKT (zero-knowledge test). Eventually DTV released cards that were effectively unhackable and the scene went away. I think there might have been a parallel scene involving Dish Network (the other big direct-to-home satellite company in the country at the time) but I never got into that. And none of us will ever forget Black Sunday!

Interesting knowing that it was happening over in Australia as well. In America the DirecTV was the main one that was being hacked. It was essentially the same exact thing. First cards were cloned and then later on HU cards were glitched to get into the memory spots. PC emulators were also big over here. The P4 new card pretty much ended the free ride.

The system was designed by a Dutch company. I remember having talked to one of their employees at a trade show in the ninetees, he was supposed to be one of the tech buffs and he was completely convinced that the system was so cleverly designed that it was impossible to ever hack it... But of course a couple of years later most of the systems eventually were hacked, not just this one.

Aah, those were the days. I was quite involved and ran a web-page back then. I spoke to Lee at THOIC few times and remember the fuss that happened. His marriage broke up from memory and after he was 'outed' he simply disappeared one day! I originally worked for Galaxy until they folded and took some interesting things with me when I left... Started hacking almost immediately and built my first card reader from a wrecked Pace DGT400 box. I added a logging mod I created to Pace boxes and captured data for all the cards in service in Australia to a database. I had VBA code for the decryption algorithm working and added it to the database so any cards I had card data for would automatically decrypt to the plain masterkey. Many people gave me card data so I had a library of usable data I ran in an emulator on a PC connected to a DGT400. Also dabbled in goldcards and erasing/recoding provider smartcards. I was able to keep the system running until 2004 when the new cards and other changes were being rolled out and the last of my valid keys expired. I was aware of ongoing work on the cards but was not bothered anymore and none of the systems were reliable, from what I heard. Cardsharing had made an appearance by then but only working on the Austar system as they were slow to change. A consortium of hackers in the city paid for my Austar system (with two boxes) so they could 'borrow' my spare card and distribute data across a net connection to each of their houses. I had given up the hacking side of things by then...why bother when others will pay for your subscription! All this eventually died. I also ran the hackers tool of choice, the famous Nokia Mediamaster 9500 satellite receiver with an add-on hard drive running an incarnation of linux that could do all sorts of 'useful' stuff! Still got it but pretty useless these days. It was capable of grabbing data packets from unencrypted satellite internet and re-assembling them...saw a lot of pornography and some interesting email streams! In the latter years, the Dutch company...I****o began sending me threatening emails, which I dutifully ignored. The laws in Australia had not caught up with the digital age and it would be hard to charge someone. That changed around 2004 with the new laws. I was well known in the Australian scene for a few years, my online name was satellite related.... k****d. Additional note: Watched the Mediawatch vid. Back in 1999, card hacking pretty much involved only adding additional channels to a card which was dead easy as all the key data was in the clear except the last byte. All that was needed was a way to cycle instructions to the card about the channel package until you found the valid one of the possible 256!! More notes: Galaxy failed because of its business model, nothing to do with piracy as it was pretty rare in the mid nineties. I always thought it was designed to fail so someone would buy it but just a theory!. There was also TARBS. This was a multi-language service with a few channels common to Foxtel. It did not use a card but relied on on-board decryption which could be over-ridden by reprogramming one of the flash-roms on the board...did a few of those too. Another bad business model saw them disappear into history. CABLE: There was also cable TV provided by Optus and Foxtel. There was a cable in a pit outside a house I lived in for a while. One night I went out and opened it. I was at the end of the run so there was just a terminating resistor. I hooked up a cable, ran it into the shed and plugged in a cable box I had been sent that came from a rental property. The tenants had left it. Turns out it was still active so I was able to see what cable was all about. Same stuff as the satellite...extra movie channels from memory. It worked for a fair while till it eventually got its shut-down message.

Bringing back some DirectTV memories. Used to bring over the card to the neighbors for 20 bucks.

Great content! Love seeing things from Australia.

great stuff mate, love the old sat tv hacking scene, if you have any newer knowledge, late 2000s early 2010s or even just general stuff should make some videos of that as well

Very interesting topic and well put together. Thank You!

interesting though mostly over my head. Back then in Zimbabwe we had pirated gold cards that enabled us to watch south african DSTV (Multichoice Africa). I think you are right it was a professional hit job.

What an old beautiful piece of software, FMCard

love it, you should definitely try to do more longer form videos like this

THIS video has to be the most honest and down to earth I have seen on the TUBE. Job well done SIR.

In 1998-1999 i was like 8 years old when i visited my cousins over the weekend. Everyone was hyped because HBO announced they would play Godzilla the movie over cable. My cousins had just bought a small device that was inside a tuna can(real tuna can) full of circuits that could decode the HBO channnel without paying. It was a lot cheaper than buying the subscription. We watched Godzilla in crystal clear image. Also there was a huge earthquake that night. Much love from Vâlcea (Hackerville) Romania!

Lol, wank card! When Austar was 'big', an installer dropped some blank card in the ceiling... they had no subscription... BUT, a quick switchero of cards and I could bypass the old man's adult channel subscription pin with 0000 from the blank card ;) I didn't get into sat 'hacking' until a bit later about the time the Afghans were watching the US drone video with some free software and a sat PCI card. I had a go at some stuff, and remember watching unencrypted internet traffic coming back to earth, which is still happening to some degree. Awesome video, legend.

Great video, what a great trip down memory lane. I remember hacking a bt878 tv tuner card to get Optus analog cable by changing the frequency band in firmware, and then building an FM audio desynth and vblabk reassembler for the "special" channels. I can't remember the name of the newscrypt equivalent application for fxtel

I know a guy who got sued by DVT in the US. Still paying off that 300K settlement. He was big time, and had his own website.

My uncle used to make these and sell the pirate cards on the reservation. We would always have free satellite tv because of him.

I miss all the cool FTA receivers that were available and easily hackable. All you needed was that magical file.. Not that I ever did such things.

here in brazil we used mostly two kinds of "cheat" one was an admin login that you put on the decoder, and the other was a piggyback on the card, the "second card" was used for some time, but since you needed to keep buying new cards it wasnt so spread

My Father did this here in the US, we got every single channel along with all the PPV movie channels, it worked for about 5 years or so, he would get hacked cards from some guy he knew…

Had these in the UK in the early/mid 90s, I don’t think anyone managed to crack the revised encryption that came with the digital service that started in about 98.

As someone who is pretty tech savvy 90% of this went over my head but I really enjoyed it and will be looking further into this subject. It's all very interesting! Thank you for a great video!!

Haha blast from the past, I remember acquiring old galaxy receivers and IRDETO hacking, still have my pheonix programmer and came across it the other day. Thanks for this

We had a plasma tv with a cable card, I was too young to know but I always wondered what that slot could be used for.

Austar was purchased by Foxtel and they used the brand for some time afterwards, but have now rebranded everything to Foxtel. I only replaced my last Austar receiver with a new Foxtel one a couple of months ago. So that's how they went under.

My father was an installer on and off over the years from the Galaxy days to the end of Austar. He also installed Vast. Helped with the roll out of Telstra NextG and NBN fixed wireless too. Austar and Foxtel had some kind of non-competing agreement for a long time. Austar served regional customers and Foxtel served metro customers. I don't believe that Austar ever operated CFC or cable TV. Around 2012 Foxtel and Austar merged with Austar operating under Foxtel Branding for a long time. In fact they continued to use Foxtel branded MyStar (competitor to iQ) boxes for sometime. This may have been because iQ and iQ2 boxes didn't have DVB tuners instead they broadcast local FTA channels over satellite. Austar only did that with ABC and SBS. It wasn't until around 2015 that Austar completely ceased to exist. The old Austar boxes still function as far as I'm aware.

No, keep the beard! Really interesting stuff Brek, entertaining and informative :D

Wow, this brings back memories of SIM hacking in the early noughties where we were brute-forcing 'Ki' keys on certain vulnerable cards (we were developing a JavaCard based app and no mobile provider would give us a legit Ki to use, despite us asking nicely)

I miss the dave and charlie days.. need to get back into this

Back in the 80's it was all about heating and removing the epoxy inside the descrambler module and then soldering on eprom sockets.

Oh man, back in the day I was doing this with DTV. I hung out in the *DSS UNDERGROUND* forum where someone would release the fixed files to load onto our floppy drive. It was great until I ignorantly built one for my sister, my brother, a friend or two etc and then each time the DTV geeks would send down a new *countermeasure* I'd get a phone call from each one of them freaking out because their TV was out!

Allo, mate. Been a long time. Yes, this popped up on my YT home page again (PC, Win 10, Chrome). Worth another watch. It was good. ;) I remember when we first had ONdigital (first DVB-T here in the early 2000s), which was briefly bought, and renamed to ITV Digital. The Gold Cards etc. It was very easy to hack. And before that with Videocrypt, and the Season Interface with VOYAGER for DOS. hehe

Man, i first view this video about a year ago and discovered your content. It's amazing. Why did you stop making videos? :( Yours sincerly, a viewer from cold germany

Interesting topic and the cloak and dagger stuff is something I was not aware of. Cable TV, pre-digital, in the UK used to be vulnerable with most of the technology coming from Germany in the form of DBOX, I guess it was a bigger scene there.

Emulators on Dave those cards were epic ..

Man, my parents had this in the 2000s in Ireland. It was great being able to watch cartoon network until they changed it and it stopped working lol

If my memory serves me (I was no older the 12 at the time) It was a lot easier to get pay per view movies etc for free. We had a phone line connected that had the end cut off. Order a movie etc and at the right time, connect a 9v battery to the phone cable. I'm guessing that's all the box was looking for as authentication.

Fascinating stuff. I knew it could be done, but never had the time or money to mees around doing it :)

Please how can I download the fmcard software or how can I get it. Please help

I remember us getting direct tv back in 02 but the signal would mess up every couple of days and the card would be replaced but this did not last long as the technician got arrested for doing this,and after that we did not have cable or satellite tv until 2014 except for a few months with time Warner in 2011. In late 2015 we cutoff directv and now only use streaming services or watch Univision on over the air tv

I have an AIR BOX, it went out of business around 2009. A couple of months after I bought 2 of their boxes. Can I switch out their smart card and just pickup local free channels and have it work like a DVR.

thank for the enlightenment

Great viewing, really enjoyed it. I ran Modshack back then (still do) and have some fond memories of Sat TV hacking back then. I was also one of the people who took down The House of Ill Compute which at the time was ran by Lee Gibling and funded by NDS. The name I used back then (still do) was HairyMonster. Ahhh card wanking lol

This clip gave me flashback to the glorious days of Viasat in early 00's. Used to go with pops and pick a new card up basicly every 3-9months once the one we had stopped working 😂 good times My neighbor on the other hand did it himself, had the Nokia sat receivers card reader connected through a pc.

Really good vídeo

back in the day there was a MK13b board that you would put into where the smart card would go and you could, reader / programmer / emulator / blocker, to the get hex key and rewrite the cards, you could even use a loptop as a sim card and log the hex keys.

Thank you mate.

Good old days, there were other dirty tricks played back in those days, a certain sat TV broadcaster allegedly released fragments of their own smartcard encyption scheme via THoIC and left it vulnerable long enough to allow hackers to rush out updates to PIC and Wafer cards only to be blown out of the water a couple of days later, it was intended to wreck the market for pirate cards.

A couple of my family members have worked at Irdeto for 1-2 decades.

I'm from the UK, but this still brought a tear to my eye. _(Card wankers? I love it!)_ ***EDIT*** Shit, I posted before watching the whole thing... This is beautifull!

Miss kac. Had the mikaboo the unlooper and all the tools memories Dave and charlie

I remember the days of free satellite I had all the way through the 00's and into 2010ish when encryption cards started rolling automatically blocking all my equipment..

hello sir can you help i need the some guide and software i will make setellite tv server so i need card infomation for box key and rsa key plz help me

Good job

Not sure if you are aware but you can transmitt your encrypted system (it sounds like videocrypt but not sure if you meant that) with program called hacktv So, transmitt with hacktv and then show your vafer cards doing some decryption, maybe for a next video if you want

ahhh sat hacking one of my fav past times from my youth, i also cloned cable modems back in the day had a load balancing router with 5 modems connected to it, i then got into card sharing and appeared in the news for costing rupert murdoch 750,000 uk pounds haha

Really interesting topic, sadly the wind noises kinda ruined audio here and there.

So nice

At my household we never paid for sat tv for like ten years! Late 90’s to 2005

This was a fantastic video! Man i would of loved to of talked with you for hours about this back then. I was fascinated by it all. Bought my own old austar dish and a sat reciever along with a gold card and a pic card. I managed somehow to get it working. Im thinking about vast now as weve moved bush and get nothing terrestrial. Is it possible to get all the vast channels? Or just get friends from different states to sign up for smart cards? I mean its all garbage free to air tv, but if i go vast id like to get as many channels as possible. Cheers. Love the video! Really interesting and exciting stuff.! Also saw those sat finders on amazon. Is it worth buying one to muck around with now days?

Optus D1 in NZ has unencrypted FTA.

I remember seeing people with old 486 pc's setting behind their tv with dbs card spoofers.

Brek, missing your vids. Have you quit the tube?

ProgDVB was handy with a Hauppauge DVB card . Somehow the encrypted channels could be decrypted .Anyone remember the deets

Virgin media the cable tv provider in the uk has completely removed viewing cards now to stop any card sharing or hacking once and for all

My dad I remember had a computer that was set up to run a program in a floppy drive then the directv receiver was hooked up to the computer which was hooked up to the TV and we have free satellite for years... this was back in 99 and 00

Ahhh the good ol days of direct tv

Or you went to your friendly local (usually Asian run) computer store and bought a card for $20.. sometimes they wouldnt even charge you for a replacement when the original one took a dump after less than 12 months

Honestly!! I dont know why i subb'd to your channel?...But the video must of interested me for sure. Btw? Dont take that the wrong way?...Im talking out loud really! lol Your video style and editing is very easy to watch and listen to. very good. Im gonna make sure i look out for more videos from yourself. Thanks. I havnt looked as its very late but i guess your all about electronics and the 2.4GHz world?? Cheers and Happy New Year.......fingers crossed we all get over this crap weve had to live last year

i remember doing or participating maybe more properly in some of this in the late 90's early 2000's time frame, in us was it the f card I think, later they had the h card I think? I got and still have I think one of the early emulator cards you plugged into a pc. I remember reading about people calling directv "dave" on usenet and various web forums, the infamous black sunday ecm, it was a cat and mouse game

hmm, i wonder how viable my parents nearly 3 decade old direct tv satellite box, but pretty sure the company has guards in place for situations like this

No new videos for 2 years 😢

Those were the days. I had a hu card writer and used to program cards for people.

What about today? can digital Htv get be unlocked?

I might remember something like this being done (not by me, you understand), in the early 2000s, with DirectTV and a card programmer in Northern North America!

Rip Pansat and Viewsat wars

I used to run a card sharing website in the UK.

it was easy to buy and program DTV cards, hardware and software was easily available

dish and dtv are still hackable using old tech but it's not as easy as it used to be. dtv tried to stop it back in the day with a mass card change and baseless threat campaign but the fight rages on. You can find some leaked information if you know the terms to search for.

5:10 - I have an original Irdeto Optus card right here next to me. I brought it back to NZ from Aus. If you want it, I'll post it to you! Just tell me where to send it.

We have it easy now with TBS cards, auto biss/oscam-emu etc

Awesome.

Well that was interesting.

Thye 876 chip was a game changer, Do you remember the Nokia Dbox that had the scsi output that could log between the card and the cam. Geez i made some money in those days.

We used to put the card in the freezer for a few minutes. Card would be able to be read and rewritten then.

I remember those cards

Wow that's amazing. Can you still hack all sky UK channels and European channels?? Will it works or it won't work??

Uff a lot of memories, DDTV amd Dish hehehe

It was beautiful to clone with Dish Network. Went from having America's Top 100 to EVERYTHING! Charlie Chat. Test Channels. All the PPV you could ever want. And then the Tyson Holyfield Fight was about to happen. Everyone was about to watch it and then the box was bricked. No more fixing those boxes.

I still have my card writter when I used to burn the cards...more of a memory piece I keep on my desk.